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Chinese Shoppers Spent $25.3 Billion In 24 Hours, This Singles Day

Nov 14 2017

While JD.com, China's number-two ecommerce platform behind Alibaba, didn't do too badly - pulling in 127.1 billion yuan or $19.14 billion - that was from November 1-12 of this year, what it calls a "Singles Day Period" vs. just 24 hours for the originator.

Alibaba also said it had turned 100,000 physical shops around China into "smart stores" for this year's event.

The outstanding results also reflect the upgrading of e-commerce itself to something known as "New Retail". Sales achieved at Amazon's last Prime Day, held in July this year and which actually lasted for 30 hours, were one billion United States dollars. But there were hints of organizers wanting to make Singles' Day an global event. "On Singles' Day, shopping is a sport, it's entertainment". Looking ahead to the third fiscal quarter for 2018, the analyst forecasts China Retail revenue will grow 45% year-over-year, experiencing overall revenue gains of 44% compared to the 54% seen in the third fiscal quarter of the year before.

Alibaba spotted the region's potential, and injected another $1 billion into Lazada in June this year, to now own 83 percent of the company.

The annual frenzy posted a 39 percent increase in sales, exceeding Citigroup Inc. estimates and defying concerns of an economic slowdown. Shoppers also spent $3.39 billion on Cyber Monday past year, the largest single online shopping day in the U.S., Adobe said.

Singles Day was begun by Chinese college students in the 1990s as a version of Valentine's Day for people without romantic partners.

The date of November 11 emerged as a counter-cultural antidote to the sentimentality of Valentine's Day.

So over the weekend, the ninth version of this co-opted observance took place, and Alibaba says more than a million retailers around the world took part.

To connect a 10th of China's six million convenience stores to the internet, Alibaba uses an app called Ling Shou Tong, meaning "connect retail".

Shoppers in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam ordered 6.5 million items, 191 per cent or almost double that of previous year, Lazada said in a media release on Monday (Nov 13). In total, almost 1.5 billion transactions were registered and about 800 million packages will arrive at the customers' doorstep in the next few days and weeks.